Complete Letters of Mark Twain

That makes it after the middle of March before I can go fairly to work – and then I’ll have to hump myself and not lose a moment. You and Bliss just put yourselves in my place and you will see that my hands are full and more than full.

When I told Bliss in N. Y. that I would write something for the Publisher I could not know that I was just about to lose fifty days. Do you see the difference it makes? Just as soon as ever I can, I will send some of the book M.S. but right in the first chapter I have got to alter the whole style of one of my characters and re-write him clear through to where I am now. It is no fool of a job, I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by it. Hold on a few days – four or five – and I will see if I can get a few chapters fixed to send to Bliss.

I have offered this dwelling house and the Express for sale, and when we go to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford will be the place.

We are almost certain of that. Ask Bliss how it would be to ship our furniture to Hartford, rent an upper room in a building and unbox it and store it there where somebody can frequently look after it. Is not the idea good? The furniture is worth $10,000 or $12,000 and must not be jammed into any kind of a place and left unattended to for a year.

The first man that offers $25,000 for our house can take it – it cost that. What are taxes there? Here, all bunched together – of all kinds, they are 7 per cent – simply ruin.

The things you have written in the Publisher are tip-top.

In haste,

Yr Bro.

Sam.

There are no further letters until the end of April, by which time the situation had improved. Clemens had sold his interest in the Express (though at a loss), had severed his magazine connection, and was located at Quarry Farm, on a beautiful hilltop above Elmira, the home of Mrs. Clemens’s sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane. The pure air and rest of that happy place, where they were to spend so many idyllic summers, had proved beneficial to the sick ones, and work on the new book progressed in consequence. Then Mark Twain’s old editor, “Joe” Goodman, came from Virginia City for a visit, and his advice and encouragement were of the greatest value. Clemens even offered to engage Goodman on a salary, to remain until he had finished his book. Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit, and Mark Twain at last seems to have found himself working under ideal conditions. He jubilantly reports his progress.

*****

To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:

Elmira, Monday. May 15th 1871

Friend bliss, – Yrs rec’d enclosing check for $703.35 The old “Innocents” holds out handsomely.

I have Ms. enough on hand now, to make (allowing for engravings) about 400 pages of the book – consequently am two-thirds done. I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it along; because it has chapters in it that ought by all means to be in the prospectus; but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work, now (a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can’t bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already written, and then cull from the mass the very best chapters and discard the rest. I am not half as well satisfied with the first part of the book as I am with what I am writing now. When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it and not finish it. If it falls short of the “Innocents” in any respect I shall lose my guess.

When I was writing the “Innocents” my daily stunt was 30 pages of Ms and I hardly ever got beyond it; but I have gone over that nearly every day for the last ten. That shows that I am writing with a red-hot interest. Nothing grieves me now – nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention – I don’t think of anything but the book, and I don’t have an hour’s unhappiness about anything and don’t care two cents whether school keeps or not. It will be a bully book. If I keep up my present lick three weeks more I shall be able and willing to scratch out half of the chapters of the Overland narrative – and shall do it.

You do not mention having received my second batch of Ms, sent a week or two ago – about 100 pages.

If you want to issue a prospectus and go right to canvassing, say the word and I will forward some more Ms—or send it by hand – special messenger. Whatever chapters you think are unquestionably good, we will retain of course, so they can go into a prospectus as well one time as another. The book will be done soon, now. I have 1200 pages of Ms already written and am now writing 200 a week – more than that, in fact; during the past week wrote 23 one day, then 30, 33, 35, 52, and 65.—How’s that?

It will be a starchy book, and should be full of snappy pictures – especially pictures worked in with the letterpress. The dedication will be worth the price of the volume – thus:

To the Late Cain.

This Book is Dedicated:

Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on account of sympathy with him, for his bloody deed placed him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking: but out of a mere human commiseration for him that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.

I think it will do. Yrs. Clemens.

P. S. – The reaction is beginning and my stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for 12 articles, of any length and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.

The suggested dedication “to the late Cain” may have been the humoristic impulse of the moment. At all events, it did not materialize.

Clemens’s enthusiasm for work was now such that he agreed with Redpath to return to the platform that autumn, and he began at once writing lectures. His disposal of the Buffalo paper had left him considerably in debt, and platforming was a sure and quick method of retrenchment. More than once in the years ahead Mark Twain would return to travel and one-night stands to lift a burden of debt. Brief letters to Redpath of this time have an interest and even a humor of their own.

*****

Letters to James Redpath, in Boston:

Elmira, June 27, 1871.

Dear red, – Wrote another lecture – a third one-today. It is the one I am going to deliver. I think I shall call it “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters Whom I Have Met,” (or should the “whom” be left out?) It covers my whole acquaintance – kings, lunatics, idiots and all. Suppose you give the item a start in the Boston papers. If I write fifty lectures I shall only choose one and talk that one only.

No sir: Don’t you put that scarecrow (portrait) from the Galaxy in, I won’t stand that nightmare.

Yours,

Mark.

Elmira, July 10, 1871. Dear Redpath, – I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it in any possible way.

Success to Fall’s carbuncle and many happy returns.

Yours,

Mark.

*****

To Mr. Fall, in Boston:

Elmira, N. Y. July 20, 1871.

Friend fall, – Redpath tells me to blow up. Here goes! I wanted you to scare Rondout off with a big price. $125 ain’t big. I got $100 the first time I ever talked there and now they have a much larger hall. It is a hard town to get to – I run a chance of getting caught by the ice and missing next engagement. Make the price $150 and let them draw out.

Yours,

Mark.

*****

Letters to James Redpath, in Boston:

Hartford, Tuesday Aug. 8, 1871.

Dear red, – I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener. People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo. See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give rigid instructions to confine me to New England; next week, send me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give you full untrammelled swing; and the week following modify it. You must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath, it is your business being the agent, and it always was too many for me. It appears to me to be one of the finest pieces of mechanism I have ever met with. Now about the West, this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with God.

Let us not profane the mysteries with soiled hands and prying eyes of sin.

Yours,

Mark.

P. S. Shall be here 2 weeks, will run up there when Nasby comes.

Elmira, N. Y. Sept. 15, 1871.

Dear Redpath, – I wish you would get me released from the lecture at Buffalo. I mortally hate that society there, and I don’t doubt they hired me. I once gave them a packed house free of charge, and they never even had the common politeness to thank me. They left me to shift for myself, too, a la Bret Harte at Harvard. Get me rid of Buffalo! Otherwise I’ll have no recourse left but to get sick the day I lecture there. I can get sick easy enough, by the simple process of saying the word – well never mind what word – I am not going to lecture there.

Yours,

Mark.

Buffalo, Sept. 26, 1871.

Dear Redpath, – We have thought it all over and decided that we can’t possibly talk after Feb. 2.

We shall take up our residence in Hartford 6 days from now.

Yours,

Mark.

XI. Letters 1871-72. Removal To Hartford. A Lecture Tour. “Roughing It.” First Letter To Howells

The house they had taken in Hartford was the Hooker property on Forest Street, a handsome place in a distinctly literary neighborhood. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, and other well-known writers were within easy walking distance; Twichell was perhaps half a mile away.

It was the proper environment for Mark Twain. He settled his little family there, and was presently at Redpath’s office in Boston, which was a congenial place, as we have seen before. He did not fail to return to the company of Nasby, Josh Billings, and those others of Redpath’s “attractions” as long and as often as distance would permit. Bret Harte, who by this time had won fame, was also in Boston now, and frequently, with Howells, Aldrich, and Mark Twain, gathered in some quiet restaurant corner for a luncheon that lasted through a dim winter afternoon – a period of anecdote, reminiscence, and mirth. They were all young then, and laughed easily. Howells, has written of one such luncheon given by Ralph Keeler, a young Californian – a gathering at which James T. Fields was present “Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly.”

But a lecture circuit cannot be restricted to the radius of Boston. Clemens was presently writing to Redpath from Washington and points farther west.

*****

To James Redpath, in Boston:

Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 1871.

Dear red, – I have come square out, thrown “Reminiscences” overboard, and taken “Artemus Ward, Humorist,” for my subject. Wrote it here on Friday and Saturday, and read it from Ms last night to an enormous house. It suits me and I’ll never deliver the nasty, nauseous “Reminiscences” any more.

Yours,

Mark.

The Artemus Ward lecture lasted eleven days, then he wrote:

*****

To Redpath and Fall, in Boston:

Buffalo depot, Dec. 8, 1871.

Redpath & fall, Boston, – Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but selections from my forthcoming book “Roughing It.” Tried it last night. Suits me tip-top.

SAM’L L. Clemens.

The “Roughing It” chapters proved a success, and continued in high favor through the rest of the season.

*****

To James Redpath, in Boston:

Logansport, Ind. Jan. 2, 1872.

Friend Redpath, – Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last night – a perfectly jammed house, just as I have had all the time out here. I like the new lecture but I hate the “Artemus Ward” talk and won’t talk it any more. No man ever approved that choice of subject in my hearing, I think.

Give me some comfort. If I am to talk in New York am I going to have a good house? I don’t care now to have any appointments cancelled. I’ll even “fetch” those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.

Have paid up $4000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list. Shall begin to pay you in a few days and then I shall be a free man again.

Yours,

Mark.

With his debts paid, Clemens was anxious to be getting home. Two weeks following the above he wrote Redpath that he would accept no more engagements at any price, outside of New England, and added, “The fewer engagements I have from this time forth the better I shall be pleased.” By the end of February he was back in Hartford, refusing an engagement in Boston, and announcing to Redpath, “If I had another engagement I’d rot before I’d fill it.” From which we gather that he was not entirely happy in the lecture field.

As a matter of fact, Mark Twain loathed the continuous travel and nightly drudgery of platform life. He was fond of entertaining, and there were moments of triumph that repaid him for a good deal, but the tyranny of a schedule and timetables was a constant exasperation.

Meantime, Roughing It had appeared and was selling abundantly. Mark Twain, free of debt, and in pleasant circumstances, felt that the outlook was bright. It became even more so when, in March, the second child, a little girl, Susy, was born, with no attending misfortunes. But, then, in the early summer little Langdon died. It was seldom, during all of Mark Twain’s life, that he enjoyed more than a brief period of unmixed happiness.

It was in June of that year that Clemens wrote his first letter to William Dean Howells the first of several hundred that would follow in the years to come, and has in it something that is characteristic of nearly all the Clemens-Howells letters – a kind of tender playfulness that answered to something in Howells’s make-up, his sense of humor, his wide knowledge of a humanity which he pictured so amusingly to the world.

*****

To William Dean Howells, in Boston:

Hartford, June 15, 1872.

Friend Howells, – Could you tell me how I could get a copy of your portrait as published in Hearth and Home? I hear so much talk about it as being among the finest works of art which have yet appeared in that journal, that I feel a strong desire to see it. Is it suitable for framing? I have written the publishers of H & H time and again, but they say that the demand for the portrait immediately exhausted the edition and now a copy cannot be had, even for the European demand, which has now begun. Bret Harte has been here, and says his family would not be without that portrait for any consideration. He says his children get up in the night and yell for it. I would give anything for a copy of that portrait to put up in my parlor. I have Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bret Harte’s, as published in Every Saturday, and of all the swarms that come every day to gaze upon them none go away that are not softened and humbled and made more resigned to the will of God. If I had yours to put up alongside of them, I believe the combination would bring more souls to earnest reflection and ultimate conviction of their lost condition, than any other kind of warning would. Where in the nation can I get that portrait? Here are heaps of people that want it, – that need it. There is my uncle. He wants a copy. He is lying at the point of death. He has been lying at the point of death for two years. He wants a copy – and I want him to have a copy. And I want you to send a copy to the man that shot my dog. I want to see if he is dead to every human instinct.

Now you send me that portrait. I am sending you mine, in this letter; and am glad to do it, for it has been greatly admired. People who are judges of art, find in the execution a grandeur which has not been equalled in this country, and an expression which has not been approached in any.

Yrs truly,

S. L. Clemens.

P. S. 62,000 copies of “Roughing It” sold and delivered in 4 months.

The Clemens family did not spend the summer at Quarry Farm that year. The sea air was prescribed for Mrs. Clemens and the baby, and they went to Saybrook, Connecticut, to Fenwick Hall. Clemens wrote very little, though he seems to have planned Tom Sawyer, and perhaps made its earliest beginning, which was in dramatic form.

His mind, however, was otherwise active. He was always more or less given to inventions, and in his next letter we find a description of one which he brought to comparative perfection.

He had also conceived the idea of another book of travel, and this was his purpose of a projected trip to England.

*****

To Orion Clemens, in Hartford:

Fenwick hall, Saybrook, Conn.

Aug. 11, 1872.

My dear Bro. – I shall sail for England in the Scotia, Aug. 21.

But what I wish to put on record now, is my new invention – hence this note, which you will preserve. It is this – a self-pasting scrap-book – good enough idea if some juggling tailor does not come along and ante-date me a couple of months, as in the case of the elastic veststrap.

The nuisance of keeping a scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won’t stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps.

Lay on the gum in columns of stripes.

Each stripe of gum the length of say 20 ems, small pica, and as broad as your finger; a blank about as broad as your finger between each 2 stripes – so in wetting the paper you need not wet any more of the gum than your scrap or scraps will cover – then you may shut up the book and the leaves won’t stick together.

Preserve, also, the envelope of this letter – postmark ought to be good evidence of the date of this great humanizing and civilizing invention.

I’ll put it into Dan Slote’s hands and tell him he must send you all over America, to urge its use upon stationers and booksellers – so don’t buy into a newspaper. The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook.”

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Примечания

1

This in 1917. D.W.

2

"Agate,” “minion,” etc., sizes of type; “take,” a piece of work. Type measurement is by ems, meaning the width of the letter ’m’.

3

Mark Twain: A Biography, by same author.

4

Henry had returned once to the Pennsylvania to render assistance to the passengers. Later he had somehow made his way to the flatboat.

5

Probably 1859.

6

It is set down historically in Mark Twain ‘A Biography.’ Harper & brothers.

7

One contribution was sent to a Keokuk paper, The Gate City, and a letter written by Mrs. Jane Clemens at the time would indicate that Mark Twain’s mother did not always approve of her son’s literary efforts. She hopes that he will do better, and some time write something “that his kin will be proud of."

8

See Mark Twain: A Biography, by the same author; Chapter XL.

9

Written across the face of the last page.

10

The “Bill” Stewart mentioned in the preceding chapter.

11

See Mark Twain: A Biography, chap XLVI, and Appendix H.

12

Mark Twain: A Biography, chap. LXXIVL.

13

Redpath’s partner in the lecture lyceum.

14

Mrs. Fairbanks, of the Quaker City excursion.